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Tonight’s 4 Factors (@ DEN, 11/17/07)

After each game this season, we’ll be taking a look at what the four factors have to say about the game– how the winner won and the loser lost. For an intro to the four factors, see A Layman’s Guide to Advanced NBA Statistics.

Another game, another discouraging loss. The Nuggets dominated on both ends of the court. The Knicks had another awful offensive performance, driven by horrific shooting and ball handling. It was the third consecutive game New York shot under 43% eFG. Meanwhile, Denver scored at will, and on the rare occasions when they did miss they simply crushed the Knicks on the offensive glass, despite being a below average offensive rebounding team coming into the game.

It’s early in the season, yes, but the Knicks are in trouble. It was expected that they would be bad on D. But aside from a flash in the pan in the season’s first few games, the offense has looked just about as bad as the D. It’s not that the offense hasn’t been living up to expectations, but rather it’s been genuinely bad, bottom-third of the league bad. If the Knicks can’t work out the offensive kinks, they’ll be bottom feeders on both ends of the court and knocked out of the playoff picture shockingly early.

4 factor stats were acquired using the ESPN4Factors script by Cherokee of the ABPRmetrics board. Firefox users can use this script (after installing the Greasemonkey extension) to see 4 factor stats automatically displayed in all NBA boxscores on espn.com.

The mediocre teams in the west like Sacramento would win 50 games in the East…squeaking into the play-offs in the East would be nothing to be particularly proud of…missing the playoffs means your team really S**Ks…